Yesterday night, the world of TV comedy got a bit of a drama injection when news broke that Community showrunner Dan Harmon had been fired by Sony pictures Television.P
Harmon had had a prickly relationship with his network overlords since the first season of the show, and will being replaced with David Guarascio and Moses Port, writers of the ABC series Happy Endings.
This morning, Harmon weighed in on the situation on his own blog with a funny, understandably upset rant indicating that not only was all of this news to him, but that none of the people involved in making the decision to remove him from the show he’d created had ever even talked to him about it.
“Why’d Sony want me gone?” he writes, “I can’t answer that because I’ve been in as much contact with them as you have. They literally haven’t called me since the season four pickup, so their reasons for replacing me are clearly none of my business.”
Harmon explains that though technically he still retains some sort of “executive consulting something or other” title, he wouldn’t have any creative control over the show, and naturally, doesn’t feel super awesome about that.
If I actually chose to go to the office, I wouldn’t have any power there. Nobody would have to do anything I said, ever. I would be “offering” thoughts on other people’s scripts, not allowed to rewrite them, not allowed to ask anyone else to rewrite them, not allowed to say whether a single joke was funny or go near the edit bay, etc. It’s….not really the way the previous episodes got done. I was what you might call a….hands on producer. Are my….periods giving this enough… pointedness? I’m not saying you can’t make a good version of Community without me, but I am definitely saying that you can’t make my version of it unless I have the option of saying “it has to be like this or I quit” roughly eight times a day.
Hilariously, Harmon then points out that that same contract would have allowed him to keep getting paid while doing anything he wants… including playing the ultra-violent catharsis simulator Prototype 2. Which he’s been doing throughout this process.
The same contract also gives me the same salary and title if I spend all day masturbating and playing Prototype 2. And before you ask yourself what you would do in my situation: buy Prototype 2. It’s fucking great.
Because Prototype 2 is great, and because nobody called me, and then started hiring people to run the show, I had my assistant start packing up my office days ago. I’m sorry.
Hey, there are certainly worse ways to deal with the fact that the show you created has been taken from you than playing super destructive, empowering video games. And as thursday’s videogame-tastic episode demonstrated, Harmon certainly has more than a passing familiarity with the medium.
“Do not believe anyone that tells you on Monday that I quit or diminished my role so I could spend more time with my loved ones, or that I negotiated and we couldn’t come to an agreement, etc,” Harmon writes. “It couldn’t be less true because, just to make this clear, literally nobody called me.”
And if they had called him, he would probably would have answered. After all, he was totally just hanging out playing video games.
Dan Harmon Is No Longer Showrunner on Community [Vulture]
Hey, I Miss Anything? [Dan Harmon’s Tumblr]
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